In recent years, due to the spread of the Internet and others, the information processing amount of personal computers and the processing speed of information have been required to be increased. Following to that, it has been requested that the capacity of hard disc drives (HDDs) integrated into personal computers and the speed of information transmission are made larger. The type of the component for supporting a magnetic head used in an HDD, which is called a magnetic head suspension, has also been shifting from a conventional type, to which signal lines such as gold wires are connected, to a wiring-integrated type, i.e., the so-called wireless suspension type, wherein signal lines such as copper wires are formed directly to a stainless steel spring.
As one out of processes for producing such a wiring-integrated type suspension, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 8-180353 discloses a process of using a laminated plate composed of a layer of a spring-property metal such as stainless steel, an insulating layer, and an electroconductive layer, patterning the spring-property metal layer and the electroconductive layer into a predetermined pattern, and then removing the insulating layer partially by plasma etching. This makes it possible to yield a magnetic head suspension wherein plural lines for connecting a magnetic head and a control circuit board to each other are formed on a thin metallic plate having the spring property so as to be integrated with the plate in the state that the insulating layer is interposed between the plate and the lines.
Patent Document: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 8-180353